Comparing Skyrim: Enhanced Edition with the classic version

Now that Skyrim: Enhanced
Edition has hit shelves, plenty of people are going to be checking to
see whether a five-year-old game is worth playing for the first time or
generally good enough to justify a second playthrough. Special Edition
is free if you own all of the Skyrim DLC and $39.99 if you don’t (the
new game contains all previous DLC). If you already own the game, you
can grab a pretty sweet upgrade for free. If you don’t, the $39.99 price
tag isn’t terrible, but it’s a good idea to know what you’re getting when you buy a new version of a five-year-old title.

As we expected, the upgrades here only upgrade
the lighting model and create some additional ground clutter. Texture
models aren’t updated at all, and the extent of the lighting
modifications varies on the scene. In some cases, the two versions of
the game look nearly identical; in others there’s a substantial
difference. In the slideshow below we’ve included screenshots from both PCGamer and PCGamesN.

PCGamesN went a bit further than simply
comparing vanilla versus SE — they also compared the vanilla game versus
a modded version of Classic. And while the Special Edition is pretty
sexy looking compared with original Skyrim, it doesn’t really hold a
candle to what the modded version of vanilla Skyrim can do. Check their
story for more details on this, and more comparison shots. I can’t say
I’m surprised at the situation, though, because Bethesda has never been
as willing to push the graphics envelope as some modders were.

We saw this when Bethesda released the High
Resolution Texture Pack for original Skyrim. While the new textures were
unquestionably better than the old versions, the high resolution
texture packs that modders had already created bested the versions from
Bethesda in every scenario. The difference between them was in the
amount of work your GPU had to do to handle the improvements — the
Bethesda updates were much kinder to video cards than the unofficial
variants.

Overall, Skyrim Special Edition will be a
great update if you’ve never screwed around with mods but just want the
game to look prettier. But it’ll take some time for modders to really
get their hands on the game and tweak updates to improve fidelity to
best effect. While some mods may work out of the box, Bethesda has said
that others will require some updating to function properly. Once that’s
done, the final product should truly shine — one might argue that this
update represents the best of both words, with new support for 64-bit
operating systems and an updated engine from Bethesda, combined with the
formidable creativity of the mod community.